Sarah Jane Coffey, on the experience of working in start-ups as a sober alcoholic: We began placing orders for the family style meal, when my boss suddenly announced to the room that I wouldn’t be eating meat. People began to chuckle, saying things like, “How can you be in Argentina and not try the meat!?” “You’re not going to try the beef? You don’t know what you’re missing!” Then, my boss added, “Yeah, she doesn’t drink either.

Visiting Indiana this week, with a brief side-trip to the Champaign-Urbana area in Illinois. Vacation reading: Blindsight by Peter Watts. File under “terrifying mega-conceptual first contact thriller”. Among many other fun ideas, Watts introduces vampires as a predatory homo sapiens offshoot who, due to a neurological defect, experience seizures at the sight of right angles. That is, unless they are taking their anti-Euclideans. Site Reliability Engineering, by various Googlers. Essays on how Google operates its software.

Stoicism is having a cultural moment - from Ryan Holiday and Tim Ferriss to Massimo Pigluicci in the New York Times and Maria Popova on Brain Pickings, the Stoics are getting name-checked and highlighted left and right1. Modern adoptees are quick to distinguish our modern adjective “stoic” from the classic Stoic attitude to emotion, but classics like Epictetus' Handbook do seem to be pretty cold towards love and relationships: Remember that you should behave in life as you do at a banquet.

Duretti Hirpa, on using pull requests to structure time and progress: I connect present and future by scribbling notes to myself, and constructing narratives for others – which intersects beautifully as changesets, and, in particular, as a fleshed-out pull request description. I believe coherent pull requests are an act of empathy, for the person reviewing my changes, for the me in the just now – the me trying to get a quality review – and for the me in the what’s next?

Aurynn Shaw, on language/editor/tech wars in “Contempt Culture”: I was taught to be contemptuous of the non-blessed narratives, and I was taught to pay for my continued access to the technical communities through perpetuating that contempt. I was taught to have an elevated sense of self-worth, driven by the elitism baked into the hacker ethos as I learned to program. By adopting the same patterns that other, more knowledgable people expressed I could feel more credible, more like a real part of the community, more like I belonged.

Tina Rosenberg reports (in The Guardian) on a homeless shelter in Ottawa that stabilizes the lives of alcoholics by giving them alcohol under supervision: The pour is calculated for each resident to be just enough to stave off the shakes and sweats of detox, which for alcohol is particularly unpleasant – seizures from alcohol deprivation can be fatal. The pour is strictly regulated: Young cuts off anyone who comes in intoxicated.

Sarah Perry summarizes and recommends John Stuart Mill’s defense of free speech: Perhaps more importantly, in a society in which dissenting views are rarely expressed, the prevailing views are often held as mere slogans or prejudices, with people rarely understanding the justifications or arguments for why the prevailing view is correct. In my introductory example, I ask why free speech is important. But if free speech is never challenged as a value, how can we be intellectually and emotionally aware of the foundations and reasons why free speech is good?

Cal Newport, on scheduling margin around your meetings: There are few experiences more stressful than a day in which your schedule is so fractured with appointments to talk about work that you have no time to act on the results of all this discussion – leading, instead, to the awful sense of a growing stack of obligations, all being juggled in your head, that you have no idea how to define or handle.

Last winter, the lock on the primary entrance to my house broke. We’d been in the house for three years and still hadn’t changed the locks, so I decided to replace all of the exterior door knobs together. Around the same time, an interior door knob broke and I replaced it and all the door knobs in the same hallway, so the styles would match. Door knobs might just be one of the most ignored objects we interact with every day.

John D. Cook, on the relationship between credentials and knowledge: When I was in college, a friend of mine gave me a math book that I found hard to get through. When I complained about it, he told me “You’re going to finish a PhD someday. When you do, do you think there’s going to be fairy dust on the diploma that’s going to enable you to do anything you can’t do now?